NOTES FROM THE. UNDERGROUND_
TONY PALMER
One of the recurring difficulties facing arts graduates leaving university is what to do with themselves and their apparent qualifica- tions. If you reject the Foreign Office or the Civil Service and don't want to settle for being a teacher or having a life in the City, the prospects can seem pretty gloomy. Journalism requires experience, so one is always told, but no one really fancies five years on the Wigan Evening Herald as a means of gaining this experience. If you wish to enter the theatre or films, the lack of any formal training schemes makes the situation almost nightmarish: In films, for example, supposing one wants to be a director, one could begin by being an assistant film editor and later an editor in the hope that some kindly disposed producer will notice your in- nate genius and offer you a movie.
An alternative method is to get into television where everyone seems to become a director overnight with the consequent lowering of standards that must be apparent to all. The theatre is even more hazardous. Quite apart from the numerous drama schools which disgorge endless students an- nually and unchecked into an already chok- ing profession, the universities, where the dramatic societies are for the most part tlw extra-curricular activity which attracts layabouts, encourage the belief that to be President of the Marlowe at Cambridge or of mos at Oxford necessarily paves the way to the pearly gates.
Richard Stroud, a gangly lad of twenty- two, who, he told me, was only nearly Presi- dent of OUDS, has put his theatrical ambition to greater use. While at Oxford, he directed three major productions; The Brig, Jack Gelber's The Apple and Romeo and Juliet, each with varying success. Lacking any ob- vious employment when he graduated and stuffed full and nauseated by a surfeit of English teaching methods, he decided to find a way to try and present set texts to pre- university students in a way that would be educationally refreshing as well as dramatically relevant. The method was simple. He and six others would tour schools presenting a workshop production of a particular play in which each actor would play a variety of roles, scenery would be con- fined to a few self-identifying props and au- dience, i.e. sixth-former, participation would be of the maximum importance.
So, for example, the actors might interpret the role of Hamlet as that of a raging homosexual and invite the students to challenge this apparently absurd in- terpretation by demonstrating on the stage or in the classroom the inadequacies of such a reading. In this way, Stroud hoped to purge the teaching of English drama of its death- wish predilections. The scheme, as such, was not new. Frank Hauser, the director of the Oxford Playhouse, has been organising what he calls 'Schools' Days' for some years now during which a current production in the Playhouse season is analysed before the schoolchildren's very eyes—how the cos- tumes are made, how the scenery is made, a sample piece of rehearsal and so on, all of which precedes an actual performance. These Saturday outings have provided much stimulation among successive generations of Oxfordshire schoolkids but Stroud com- plains that the events themselves have settled into a comfortable formula and lack any ge- nuine educational follow-through. They have become almost spectator sport. Nonetheless, he recognises the usefulness of such days, and wishes to supplement rather than replace them. Organisations more closely akin to his have also been tried in the Bristol and Salisbury areas but these have been much more part of a deliberate policy on the part of the local repertory theatre. Get 'em young, is the message, and we'll have an assured audience for the future.
Stroud's view is wider. Very little is known, he argues, about why people go to the theatre today. There is surprisingli no audience research. There would appear to be very little that can be had by way of theatrical experience that cannot be had elsewhere, at less cost and at less in- convenience. The continuing debate about the relevance of the proscenium arch—should it be theatre in the round or should it not—is symptomatic of the general concern about the shape of the theatre to come. Orlando Fur/ow, which, when com- pared with the forty-third revival of Blithe Spirit, is very much underground theatre, was an experience where the audience were almost a central part of the action.
Peter Hall's complaint in the Observer that, for example, television can never recap- ture the more essential experience of theatre is begging all sorts of questions. He forgets or ignores that television is, de facto, a different experience from the theatre and may ultimately replace it. The underground experiments with multi-media light-shows, also called Theatre, again indicate a possible area of future development. All in all, the Theatre, as a medium, is in turmoil and Stroud believes that both for himself and for the actors (all of whom he intends will be professional) he involves, as well as for the schoolchildren, a re-examination through his workshop productions of -the essence of Theatre cannot come amiss, especially if it is serving some more obviously useful function meanwhile. The failure of attempts such as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's 'Theatre- ground' he ascribes to the patrician nature of the entertainment offered rather than any inherent deficiency in the idea itself.
The problem was where to get the money from. County drama advisers were sym- pathetic and offered £100. The Arts Council, predictably, said they would wait and see how it went befOre offering any grant. Even- tually, the Open University—remember them?—came to the rescue.' They were already intending to organise summer schools as part of their pre-degree courses for the enrolled but as yet non-formally educated students. Although the age-range of these students would vary, they represented in approach very much the same challenge as would the sixth-formers. So Stroud intends to use this chance to try out his scheme with a six actor production of Hamlet. He hopes that the experiment will persuade other educational authorities that much is to be gained from this radical ap- proach to drama and that the administrative base and semi-respectability of the Open University will encourage and permit the necessary cash to be forthcoming.
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